IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON EDUCATION

2.  Impacts on education: Schools
 Impacts on education: Families
 Assessments
 Graduates
 Solutions?

3.  The global lockdown of education institutions
is going to cause major (and likely unequal)
interruption in students’ learning; disruptions
in internal assessments; and the cancellation
of public assessments for qualifications or their
replacement by an inferior alternative

4.  Health crisis : The COVID-19 pandemic is first
and foremost a health crisis
 Effect productivily for parents
 Effect on learning of students
 Effect on social life of students
 Online teaching is a challenge for students as
well as teachers

5.  Teaching is moving online, on an untested
and unprecedented scale
 Student assessments are also moving online,
with a lot of trial and error and uncertainty for
everyone
 can loss in social skills and social awareness
 effect of COVID on skills.

6.  Going to school is the best public policy tool available
to raise skills.
 While school time can be fun.
 and can raise social skills.
 Rais social awareness.
 from an economic point of view the primary point of
being in school is that it increases a child’s ability.
 Even a relatively short period of missed school will
have consequences for skill growth.
 But can we estimate how much the COVID-19
interruption will affect learning? Not very precisely, as
we are in a new world.
 Two pieces of evidence are useful.

7.  Perhaps to the disappointment of some, children have not generally been sent
home to play.
 The idea is that they continue their education at home, in the hope of not missing
out too much.
 Families are central to education and are widely agreed to provide major inputs
into a child’s learning, as described by Bjorklund and Salvanes (2011).
 The current global-scale expansion in home schooling might at first thought be
seen quite positively, as likely to be effective.
 But typically, this role is seen as a complement to the input from school. Parents
supplement a child’s maths learning by practising counting or highlighting simple
maths problems in everyday life; or they illuminate history lessons with trips to
important monuments or museums.
 Being the prime driver of learning, even in conjunction with online materials, is a
different question; and while many parents round the world do successfully
school their children at home, this seems unlikely to generalise over the whole
population.


8.  The careers of this year’s university graduates may be severely affected
by the COVID-19 pandemic.
 They have experienced major teaching interruptions in the final part of
their studies, they are experiencing major interruptions in their
assessments, and finally they are likely to graduate at the beginning of a
major global recession.
 Evidence suggests that poor market conditions at labour market entry
cause workers to accept lower paid jobs, and that this has permanent
effects for the careers of some.
 Oreopoulos et al. (2012) show that graduates from programmes with
high predicted earnings can compensate for their poor starting point
through both within- and across-firm earnings gains, but graduates from
other programmes have been found to experience permanent earnings
losses from graduating in a recession.

9.  The closure(closing of something) of schools, colleges and universities not only
interrupts the teaching for students around the world; the closure also coincides
with a key assessment period and many exams have been postponed or
cancelled.
 Internal assessments are perhaps thought to be less important and many have
been simply cancelled.
 But their point is to give information about the child’s progress for families and
teachers.
 The loss of this information delays the recognition of both high potential and
learning difficulties and can have harmful long-term consequences for the child.
 Andersen and Nielsen (2019) look at the consequence of a major IT crash in the
testing system in Denmark.
 As a result of this, some children could not take the test. The authors find that
participating in the test increased the score in a reading test two years later by
9% of a standard deviation , with similar effects in mathematics.
 These effects are largest for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

10.  The global lockdown of education institutions is going to cause
major (and likely unequal) interruption in students’ learning;
disruptions in internal assessments; and the cancellation of public
assessments for qualifications or their replacement by an inferior
alternative.
 What can be done to mitigate these negative impacts? Schools
need resources to rebuild the loss in learning, once they open
again.
 How these resources are used, and how to target the children who
were especially hard hit, is an open question.
 Given the evidence of the importance of assessments for learning,
schools should also consider postponing rather than skipping
internal assessments. For new graduates, policies should support
their entry to the labour market to avoid longer unemployment
periods.